成人论坛

1. He gets his love of writing from his dad

Kureishi comes from a family of writers, or in some cases frustrated writers. His dad, a Pakistani bureaucrat, never realised his writing ambitions. “There are many writers in my family,” says Kureishi, “mostly journalists. My dad wanted to be a novelist and he wrote these books which were more like memoirs than novels.”

None of his father’s work was ever published, but literature was a subject the two bonded over. “When I got to about 14, I thought, ‘I’ll give this a go’," he says. His dad was quite hoping his son might be a cricketer, however Kureishi “was frightened of the ball, which is not an advantage in a cricketer”.

2. The Beatles inspired him

“My life grew in parallel with The Beatles,” says Kureishi, who was born in 1954, “which was really the idea that these four little oiks from Liverpool could become musical geniuses.” Growing up in Bromley, the success of The Beatles showed him that where you were from did not define what you could do. “That was a huge example to us kids from the suburbs. ‘I could do that. We could be like that’… It really changed our sense of ourselves.”

Naveen Andrews starring in the 1993 TV adaptation of Buddha of Suburbia

3. Writing about sex is difficult

A large part of Kureishi’s writing has dealt with sex and intimacy, from the sexual liberation in The Buddha of Suburbia to the tentative gay romance of My Beautiful Laundrette.

Kureishi says writing about sex is tricky, “but I think sex has to be written about. It’s a central motive to people in their lives. None of us would be here without it… What you can’t really do is write about acts. You have to write about what it means to somebody. What’s interesting about sex is the intimacy it creates between two people. They can do and say stuff between them that they wouldn’t say in normal civil life.”

4. His accident was like a bomb in his family

On Boxing Day, 2022, Kureishi fell and hit his head, causing spinal injuries that left him paralysed. He describes his accident as “a bomb in the family. It blows everything up.”

He says the aftermath of the incident was “very dark and depressing”, but with rehab he’s had some improvement in his movement. “I’m stronger,” he says. “I’m waggling my arms around a bit. I can move my legs a bit, but I can’t use my hands. That’s the worst thing of all. I don’t mind so much not being able to walk, but I can’t pick up anything. I can’t use a computer. I can’t use a pen.”

5. His injuries didn’t stop him writing

“Even though I was in a terrible state and drugged up to the nostrils, I wanted to write,” Kureishi says of his recovery. But without use of his limbs, he’s had to find a new way to go about it. “My partner Isabella sat at the end of the bed and wrote down my words on her phone. I was doing that every day.” He began writing daily about his rehabilitation, because he needed to.

“I was really writing for my life. Writing to remind myself I was still a writer, a human being.” Asked if he’s as creatively driven as he was before his accident, he says, “I’m much more so now. I’m fighting to remain alive. When I say alive, I mean to be a writer… It’s absolutely, completely necessary for me to do stuff.”

6. His accident has brought him closer to his children

As he can’t physically write himself, Kureishi now primarily writes via his son, Carlo. He says it means they spend more time together than they used to. “When the kids grow up, you don’t see them so much,” he says, but that changed after the accident. He now writes with Carlo every day, dictating what he’d like to say. Carlo doesn’t always agree. “We have many arguments and disputes and differences, but he drags me into writing things I wouldn’t have written otherwise… When you collaborate with someone, you can do something you can’t do by yourself.”

7. He's not stoic about his condition

As much as he’s doing all he can to adjust to his new reality, Kureishi is not accepting of it: “I’m really annoyed about it. I’m annoyed with God. I’m annoyed with fate, just as anyone would be… I’m angry because I’m frustrated because I can’t do the things that I want to do.”

8. He’s done with writing fiction

For most of his career, Kureishi was a novelist. He says those days are now over. “I don’t want to write fiction anymore… I don’t want to make anything up. What’s happened to me is so profoundly damaging that I can’t make things up anymore. I’m going to do a movie based on Shattered (his memoir about his recovery), and I’ll have to make up bits of that, I guess, but I don’t really want to make stuff up. I don’t need to.”

9. He's learning to accept love

Kureishi has been in talking therapy for years, which he’s always found valuable. His relationship to his analyst has now shifted. “I know how he can’t save me,” he says. “I used to believe that he could save me from the terrible things happening in my life.”

Therapy is now about acceptance. “All he can do is help me to try and accept my condition. A condition I have to accept and I don’t want to accept. I don’t want to be this person. I hate being this person.” Primarily, he’s learning to accept love. “It’s really about acknowledging your dependence,” he says. “You’ve got to allow other people to love you. People really want to do things for you… What’s left after an accident like mine that destroys your physical body is still love.”